


Qualia

by ailurish



Series: Goodbye to a World [1]
Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, F/F, Gen, Multi, Post-Canon, Recovery, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2019-11-27 07:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18191858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ailurish/pseuds/ailurish
Summary: The world that Chell has been returned to is a changed one. As she acclimates to the slow life that follows her ordeal at Aperture, she finds companions who are also getting used to a world free of the danger of the Combine. When a greedy faction turns up and sets their sights on the long-abandoned Aperture Laboratories, Chell knows that she is the only human who stands a chance at surviving what they'll find down there. To protect the peace she's found, she knows she has to return. In all honestly, she never expects to make it out alive.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly: No knowledge of the Half-Life universe is required to understand this, nor do you need to have played the fan-made game where Mel makes her appearance, so if you've only played/watched Portal you'll be fine!
> 
> Second: This is the first part of a story in three acts. Inspired by the music of Porter Robinson (and also by the Chelldos fandom, who are still kicking around out there after all these years! Hello!)

Chell lies in the dirt with only one thought in her head, and one thought alone: _breathe_. Her lungs ache with the sweetness of oxygen. Her arms itch with the tickle of wheat, with little earth bugs crawling quickly over fingers, forearms.

Maybe she’ll die like this. It’s a comforting thought, even as the sun shines life down onto the field, bright behind her eyelids. Her skin feels tight, singed red as the result of lying here with only the wheat stalks to shield her. If she were to die, would her body feed the roots? The bugs? At least it would be warm. Chell would be happy to die here, so long as it means she doesn’t die _there_.

Below her, far below the soil that feeds the field, below the layers of rock and sediment, sprawling huge and cold and damp, it’s there. Aperture Laboratories. A frown comes to her at the thought, and the wrinkle of her nose stings with sunburn. She focuses on the warmth and the breeze, but she can’t force out the thought now that it’s come to her. Down and down, cavernous and sterile, crawling not with bugs but with bots. Let _her_ have them. Let her keep them. But not Chell.

A cloud runs over the sun, blocking the bright red rays from seeping through the skin of her eyelids. Chell opens her eyes to the sky, still blue and bright enough to hurt. The sun has drifted behind her now. The earth at her back doesn’t feel quite safe enough anymore. She pulls herself to her feet, dirt between bare toes, and scans the horizon. Ahead of her and to the sides - wheat as far as she can see. A small copse of trees in the distance, hiding not a road but another field growing, perhaps, a different crop. Behind her - farther off now, but not far enough - a small, metal shed. Chell had stumbled and run from it, half blinded by the sun, lungs protesting fresh air, boots catching and pulling on the dirt until she had fallen and not gotten up.

From here, she can barely make out the shape of her singed companion. Her heart does a funny little leap at the sight of it, but the cube is too heavy to move without the help of the gun, and probably for the best. She turns away. Runs her hands over the stalks. The sun isn’t close to the horizon just yet, but it will be, and Chell doesn’t intend to spend the night out here. She doesn’t want the moon looking down on her. 

Forward, then. She stretches, swoops down to catch the boots in her fingers, and begins to walk.

-

She heads toward structures she can see in the distance, like a mirage. Just as dusk is beginning to settle over the fields, they resolve themselves into a farmhouse and various outbuildings. Chell steps a little quicker, bare feet numb and the boots weighing heavier and heavier as she goes. Despite the weeds that have overtaken the gravel drive, the house looks to be in good repair. Someone has to be tending all these crops, after all, and Chell hops up onto the porch, propping the screen door against her hip as she raps on the door. She listens for any sounds from within, maybe a shuffling of feet; looks for a doorbell and finds none. She knocks again, hope dwindling, and tries the door. Locked. Wind rustles at her hair. Chell drops the boots with a thud onto the porch, cupping her hands around her eyes to peer inside. There are curtains drawn over the window, and she angles to see around it, but the filtered light is dusky and doesn’t show anything. 

She tries one of the outbuildings. It’s locked too, a garage maybe, a dusty workshop inside. Another building with a huge bay door holds a massive combine harvester inside. A chill runs up the back of her spine as Chell peers in through a window on the building’s locked door, the machine rising up in the dull light like a sleeping monster. She steps away, heads back to the house.

Fron the side, it's clear that the house itself has been here a while, but newer additions have been added onto the original architecture. A small addition to the back of the house looks like it may have been a porch at one time, a couple wooden steps raised up to the door, multiple clotheslines strung from the siding to a metal pole. The backdoor is locked too. Chell knocks again just in case and tries the handle. There’s no deadbolt, so she steps back and gathers her strength. She doesn’t have much of that, to be quite honest, and it takes more effort than she’d like but eventually the lock cracks and she’s able to swing the door open. 

She steps gingerly inside. It’s a mudroom, perhaps, or a laundry, a white basin underneath the faucet and some baskets laid out on the floor. A narrow hall leads towards the rest of the house, and Chell peers down it cautiously. 

“Hello?” she tries, and winces. It comes out as a croak and a hiss, hardly a word at all, and her throat aches. She swallows a few times and decides to knock on the wall instead. No sound or movement, so she edges down the hall and enters a large kitchen. The house doesn’t appear to be abandoned, but it doesn’t look lived in either. There’s no clutter, a dried up bar of soap at the sink and a dead planter on the sill of the window above. Most of the kitchen space is taken up by a large table with picnic-style benches. Chell tries a lightswitch and is surprised when the lights flicker on. The refrigerator is empty, looks as though it’s been scrubbed clean, and it’s not plugged in. But there are pantry doors that Chell reaches for with her breath held. She pauses with her hands wrapped around the handles, then pulls.

The pantry is full. It’s packed high with canned food - vegetables and stew, soup, canned fruit. Some in glass mason jars, some commercially produced. Boxes of granola. Sugar, flour. The lingering effects of adrenal vapors mean her stomach doesn’t react, but she licks her dry lips and stares at the cans as if they’re not even real, a trick of the brain maybe, or a fever dream. Abruptly, thirst tears into her and she stumbles toward the sink, turning the tap. It groans and creaks, and then water sputters out of the spout and Chell’s huffs out a shocked laugh. Luck is on her side at last. 

She doesn’t bother finding a glass, just sips from her cupped hands. It’s tangy and murky, clearly from a well that hasn’t been used recently and full of minerals. She should probably run the taps for a while before drinking any further, but she squeaks them closed for now. 

Chell moves through the house, knocking on the walls to make sure she doesn’t surprise anyone who might be here, sleeping maybe or distracted or hard of hearing. But there’s nobody. Just a number of rooms, oddly furnished with wireframe beds instead of couches and armchairs. She finds a staircase when she makes it the front of the house and heads up. The upper floor is much smaller than the downstairs, bedrooms and a closet, and near the center is a bathroom. It’s a wide room, a shelving unit to one side stacked with soft towels, another basin sink, and against the back wall is a porcelain bathtub. Chell pauses here.

She can’t remember the last time she was clean. Aperture has made her skin pale and dry, her hair lank, her clothes covered in dirt and toxicity. She should eat, or rest. Instead she leans over the tub and turns the faucet. For a long moment, nothing happens and she wonders if the pipes work or if she’s mean to fill it with buckets, but then water and air stutter out like the taps in the kitchen had. It’s a dull brown as it hits the basin of the tub, flaky bits of black residue floating in the the chilled, unappealing water. Chell pulls the plug and watches water swirl down the drain as it continues to pour out of the spout, transfixed.

It will take a while to clear. She wanders back down the stairs, opening closet doors until she finds the water heater, then stares it down for a moment. She’s coaxed more cantankerous machines back to life, she can handle this. It’s an easy puzzle: open the gas valve, turn on the pilot light. The heater gives an almighty shutter and clank as it kicks to life, and Chell takes a few hasty steps back. To her relief, it settles down and the house is filled with a low hum. Remembering the dry, cracked bar of soap by the kitchen sink, Chell loops through the house to grab it and by the time she’s back upstairs, the water running from the bathtub faucet looks a bit clearer. She shuts it off to give the heater some time to work.

Night has fallen for good now over the world. With the state of things, it doesn't seem likely that whoever lives here has just gone out for errands, and Chell tries to nurture the feeling of safety. Perched on the edge of the tub, her mind wanders. Back over fields, now washed with moonlight. She wonders if the underground laboratories stretch this far, reaching out like dark fingers in her mind, ready to wrap themselves around her body and yank her back. But no. She’s not welcome back.

Blindly, Chell reaches behind her and twists the faucet back on as a distraction from the horror of her thought. The water splashing into the tub is lukewarm now, and it’s good enough, so she plugs it up, holding the dry bar of soap under the running water until it’s saturated and the room smells vaguely of glycerin. 

There’s a mirror above the basin sink. If she looked, who would she see? Chell tries to remember what she looks like. Her memory slides over the thought, like sunblind eyes: snatches of her features, but not the whole. The last time she looked at her reflection, it wasn’t through glass and silver: it was Chell, or something like Chell, reflected back and back in an infinite loop of portals through matter. Herself, approaching herself, on the other side of a room.

She rises. Her heart pounds dully in her chest, and then she’s standing in front of the mirror. Hello, Chell. It’s strange. The eyes of her mother, which she never saw for herself. But that’s what they always said: her mother’s eyes, her mother’s features. But her skin is her dad’s. Her hair is her dad’s. Her hands, rough and calloused, are his hands. Isn’t this what she wanted to find? Isn’t this why she walked willingly on her own two legs through the very front door of Aperture Laboratories?

Her eyes fall to her clothes, the logo emblazoned there, and with steady hands she tugs the tank out of the waistband of her shorts and peels it off. She unties the sleeves of the orange jumpsuit and pulls it off her legs, echoes of the day she pulled it on. Willingly. Slid into the stasis chamber, willingly - 

Her sports bra comes off next. Her ribcage aches, her lungs try to expand but aren’t used to it. She pulls off the shorts. The seams of her underwear have left deep, painful indents on her skin. She reaches for the last garment on her body, a strip of cloth wrapped around her right wrist. The fingers of her left hand unwind it carefully. The skin over the bones of her left wrist is ringed with a dark, deep purple. 

She doesn’t remember tying her hair back, and frankly is surprised that the elastic is still snug. Did it come from her? Was her hair pulled back that day? Is it Aperture issue? She pulls out her ponytail and stretches the band between her fingers, unable to remember. Her hair has been in its ponytail for so long that it remains kinked together even as gravity pulls it down between her shoulder blades.

The bathtub is nearly full. Chell steps out of the mess of clothes that she’d let fall at her feet, sits at the edge and swings her legs into the water. She tries, and fails, to avoid looking at her knees, breath quickening at the sight. 

Not willing. _Not willing_. She’d signed her name, hadn’t she? But she hadn’t understood. Gingerly, she touches an index finger to the small, round port on the outside of her knee. There’s a matching port on the inside. She may have left Aperture, but Aperture, it seems, will never leave her. She slips fully into the bath.

Her mind blanks. Her muscles relax in a way that’s blissful, and Chell slips lower under the still-murky, nearly warm water, her hair flowing around her shoulders. Down further until her face is half-submerged, until her knees have to curl up for her to fit all the way, until her eyes close and the water covers her ears and dulls the sound of everything, everything. Until her body doesn’t feel like a body anymore. Until her lungs ache and she has to grip the sides and pull herself up, and breathe heavily, and remember where she is. 

The water has cooled already, so Chell reaches for the plug and tilts it so that it begins to slowly filter away, twisting on the tap to replace the cold water with warm. Her fingers find the soap, settled to the bottom somewhere around her hips, and she begins to wash her skin clean of everything that will leave it. Her shoulders and arms, her chest and belly, hips and thighs. Knees, which aren’t her own, which are just knees. Her legs and her calloused feet. Bruises and cuts and burns are part of the landscape of her body now. She rubs the soap over the length of her hair, wringing out the dirt and oils, rubs vigorously at the top of her head and sinks once more under the water to wash out the suds. She lets the bath drain and run at once until the water is relatively clear now and properly warm. Then she sets about gently untangling the hair matted together around where the elastic once sat. She sits in the water until the skin on her fingertips prunes and it goes cold again. She runs her fingers gently, delicately over the purpling bruise on her wrist. Encircles it with her own warm skin, but can’t erase the phantom sensation of cold steel. The associated sensation of her lungs catching and pulling and circulating the air as it rushes out of the world and into the universe. 

Gingerly she rises, stepping out dripping onto the bathroom floor, and imagines that she’s new again. And she is, really. She’s not the person who walked into Aperture Laboratories, and she’s not the person who walked out. She’s Chell. She’s ready to just be Chell.

She wraps one of the fluffy towels around her torso and squeezes the water out of her hair with another, then twists it up atop her head. After a moment’s deliberation, she scoops her clothes off the floor and dumps them into the soapy bath water. Along with the dirt, blood, and sweat, bits of colored gel flake loose from the fabric. Chell feels vaguely guilty about letting the toxic substances run down the drain.

The summer night is warm enough that she can get away with hanging the clothes out to dry on the line out back. Hitching the towel tighter around her chest, Chell stands at the broken back door and contemplates the night. It’s safe. It’s safe enough. There aren’t any clips so she drapes the clothing over the line as quickly as possible, then heads back into the house. The lights in the kitchen cast it in a warm glow. It’s with her head ducked to let her hair fall forward so she can scrub it dry with the towel, staring at her toes, that she remembers the long fall boots.

The front door is locked simply with a button knob and a deadbolt. She undoes them both and steps onto the porch to grab the boots and drag them into the hall. The house is anything but secure at this point, what with the back door broken, so Chell leaves the front propped open too with just the screen door to block out critters. She hasn't looked for an AC unit, so she opens as many windows as she dares to let the night air in and the lingering heat from the day out. The bed frames scattered curiously around the ground floor are all bare, but she remembers that the beds upstairs had proper frames and mattresses. She chooses the room at the end of the hall, one with a window that faces the front yard and the road beyond, and slips under the single sheet still wearing the bath towel.

Chell sleeps. As the final mercy at the close of this interminably long day, she doesn't dream.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for a panic attack in this chapter.

She’s pretty confident with “hello.” It would sound fine to anyone standing close enough to hear a whisper, anyway. The sounds themselves are easy. The _h_ is just a huff of air. Chell watches her mouth in the mirror as she forms the _l_ , the tip of her tongue pressing just behind her teeth, and her lips rounding out the _o._ The problem is that when she tries to give voice to the sounds, it comes out like the creak of a door on rusty hinges. Saying _Chell_ is similar to hello, but the first sound has to be forced out and the rest of her name is hardly a recognizable word. 

She tries a new one: _summer_ ; challenges her reflection to form the sounds. She can’t. _Summer_ , she tells herself firmly, picturing the letters as if they were written out in front of her, but all she can manage is a long “sssssss” and her mouth gaping as she tries to recall how to speak the rest of the word. She quits trying after her third attempt, leaving her reflection behind to trot down the stairs and into the kitchen.

As soon as her stomach could handle the thought of real food, she’d made a second discovery about the pantry: most of the cans were stamped with expiration dates that ranged from 2029 through 2036. For long minutes, the numbers had been incomprehensible. Somehow, out of everything she’d experienced, _this_ had been what made her feel completely displaced from her own life, like she was standing outside of herself, looking down on an incomprehensible reality, desperate to wake up. The sound of her own breath had shaken her from the terror, harsh and fast in her ears, and Chell had closed that train of thought behind a door, shutting it neatly out.

Now, she grabs a can of corn and pops open the tab. She has no idea of the actual year, whether any of the food is expired or not, but so far none of it had made her ill. Beyond a brief inspection of the can to make sure there's no bulging or rust, she grabs a spoon from the drawer by the sink and digs in. She gazes idly out the window as she eats, hip resting against the counter, thinking about all the corn growing in the field kitty-corner to the crossroads she's walked down on her third day, as far as she had dared to go. The canned corn has a slight metallic taste, some preservatives probably, and Chell daydreams about the fall arriving and picking fresh corn and all the small, sweet moments of life she'd stopped considering somewhere between the stench of toxic waste and the creak of decaying steel.

She stomachs about half the can and sticks the rest in the fridge. It's been three weeks now, give or take a couple days. At first she'd slept so often that it had been difficult to tell if she was waking on the same day or a different day; if it had been minutes or hours. At first she'd been afraid that her biological clock was well and truly broken, but forcing herself into bed at sunset had eventually yielded to waking up at sunrise. Her systems were resetting, falling back into the purely organic rhythm that had guided life for eons. 

Without much to do, Chell is finding a pattern of exercise and sleep to occupy her time. She pushes easily out of the back door, still broken, and nearly trips over the book she’d left on the steps the evening before. Calling it a _book_ may be generous; it’s actually a maintenance manual for combine harvester that she’d found in the old shed. Whoever lived here must have been using that shed for storage, because when Chell had been able to bust open the door, she’d found it littered with junk and covered in an impressive layer of dust. She’d found the manual before she ever found the nests - field mice must have been living it large in that shed all winter. After that she’d avoided touching much. Hanging above an old work desk were the yellowed pages of a calendar, frozen in May of 2011. She’d already been inside Aperture then, but it was a date close enough to the last year she remembers that Chell had felt an odd sense of loss just looking at it. Tired of existing in spaces that seem to be frozen in time, she’d left the shed with no further plans of returning.

She still can’t get into the building that’s storing the actual combine, but she likes to think that she could get that thing moving or fix it up now that she’s spent idle hours reading the dry manual. Or… not. The hulking machine still made her uneasy.

The sun is well on it’s way to noon by the time her body gives up on push-ups, and she heads inside for a shower. Halfway down the main hallway, she hears a low rumbling sound that makes her pause, listening. It’s a car. She’s heard one or two by now - not nearly as many as she would expect, all moving too fast and the road too far away to really do anything but confirm that she’s not alone in the world. But this time, it’s unmistakably close. It’s the sound of tires rolling over gravel. It makes the hair stand up all along her arms and the back of her neck, frozen still right there in the middle of the hall.

Chell knows her escape routes. The front door. A window on the east side of the house where the screen had once been busted and never replaced. Upstairs, a bedroom window that made the roof easily accessible. The back door, which is no longer able to secure, where she’d hung a bundle of spoons over the eave as a makeshift bell in case anyone tried to come in during the night. In spite of this, where a person would normally choose flight, or freeze, or even fight, Chell does none of these. Instead she moves forward as if compelled, slowly and silently until she’s standing at the open front door, just behind the screen.

A truck has pulled to a stop on the gravel drive. There’s a middle-aged man shutting the driver’s side door and a younger man circling around from the passenger side, stretching. There’s a third around the back, opening the tailgate. In the back of her mind, Chell knows that she should be cautious. The farmhouse, as familiar and solid as it now feels to her, is not hers, and she’s keenly aware now that she’s trespassing. An interloper. But fear is not nearly strong enough to break through the magnetic pull she feels: a human being, drawn by nature and compelled by loneliness, towards other human beings.

She hasn’t spoken to a living soul in so, so long. Chell steps out onto the porch.

One of the men by the side of the truck, the younger one, notices her first. He narrows his eyes in confusion and goes, “Uhhhh,” which alerts the others. The older man turns and just peers at her, but the one behind the truck steps into view and draws a gun from his side, fingers hovering over the safety. It’s not the kind of weapon Chell is conditioned to fear.

“Woah, hey there,” calls the older man not unkindly, and the younger man looks at his companion and says, “Aaron, what the hell man, does she look armed to you?”

“Dunno,” Aaron says darkly, eyes still on Chell. 

She has the presence of mind to raise her hands, showing that they’re empty. She remembers her practiced _hello_ , but she finds that her jaw is clenched shut with the effort of not crying, and so she makes no attempt to speak. As she lowers her hands, she notices the older man’s eyes flick down to her chest and then back to her face in a blink. To Chell’s surprise, recognition crosses his face.

“Listen, we don’t wanna hurt you,” he says, maintaining eye contact. “Aaron’s a dumbass, ignore him. Aaron, lower your damn firearm.”

Aaron rolls his eyes dramatically, but does as he’s told. 

“I’m Tom,” the older man continues, one hand stretched palm outward as if to calm a spooked horse, the other gesturing to his companion. “And this is Santiago. What’s your name?”

Her mouth won’t form the shapes. Chell swallows hard, biting the inside of her cheek. Tom doesn’t cut a very threatening figure in his loose jeans and dirty tee, though he holds himself confidently. Beside him, Santiago leans in and stage-whispers, “Do you think she can hear us?” 

Tom turns his face so that his answering whisper actually fulfills his purpose, which is that Chell can’t hear what he says. But Santiago’s already wide eyes widen further, eyebrows reaching his hairline as he, too, turns his gaze from Chell’s face to her chest and then back up again.

It’s enough that Chell finally crosses her arms, annoyed. She’s wearing the only clothes she has, shorts and the Aperture issued tank top that she’d been given on the day she volunteered. Then the pieces click into place: the logo on the tank, the farmhouses’ proximity to the metal shed leading to the depths of the facility, and the recognition on the men's’ faces.

The truck’s tailgate slams shut. “You freaks gonna stand there all day? Jesus, act like you’ve never seen a woman before. Let’s go, I’m fucking starving.”

Aaron stalks toward the house, barely sparing Chell a glance as she sidesteps to let him pass through the door. Santiago follows, sighing and offering a kind smile as he passes.

Tom steps forward cautiously, although if Chell were going to run she would have done so by now. 

“Miss, we think we got some idea where you came from, and we’re not about to turn you out on the street. Got plenty of room and could use plenty of help in the future, if you’re willing.” He pushes the screen door open and stands aside, giving Chell a clear entry back into the house. It’s a choice - an easy decision, but a choice nonetheless. 

She ushers him inside first.

Halfway down the hall leading back to the kitchen, Aaron’s voice reaches them. “Aw, come on! She ate half our goddamn food!”

A shock of annoyance flits through her, and it must show on her face because Tom laughs. Chell did not eat half of the food, there’s no way she could have, which is along the lines of what Santiago is telling Aaron when she enters the room. 

“He’s overreacting, he does this,” Santiago explains. “We have a convoy arriving in a couple days with more food, anyway.”

A convoy? That might explain an empty house full of beds. Chell feels somehow like a child, standing there in the middle of the kitchen. She despairs for a moment at the loss of her quiet days, but the thought of getting used to isolation scares her more than what’s to come. 

“So,” Tom says. “Can’t talk, huh?”

Chell shrugs, gesturing vaguely at her throat.

“We’ll scrounge up something to write on, that way we - oh, or how about this?” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out what takes Chell an embarrassingly long moment to recognize as a cell phone. He prods at it for a second, then hands it to Chell. “Just type your name there.”

She takes the device gingerly. It’s open to a notes application, which she types her name into, then angles the phone back towards Tom so he can read. 

“Chell,” he says aloud. It startles her to hear her own name spoken aloud, but it’s comforting overall. She offers a smile, and hopes he’ll say it again. Her eye is drawn then to the top of the screen, where a number of small icons parade in front of the time and date. _10:16 6/4/2037._

Chell’s heart thunders in her ears. _2037_. It’s been 28 years. _Twenty-eight years_. Her chest restricts, the door she’d locked those numbers behind swinging free in her mind. The numbers on the screen begin to blur, and Chell leans forward to let the phone clatter to the tabletop, clutching instead at the edge of the table to keep herself upright.

“Woah! Woah woah hey - “

“Is she okay?”

“Clearly she’s not okay.”

Someone touches her shoulder, and Chell flinches violently back.

“Sorry, I’m sorry-!” the someone says, and Chell finds Santiago’s wide gaze. “Just, you’re hyperventilating, you gotta breathe.”

As soon as he says it, she’s keenly aware of her heaving chest, lightheaded as her breaths come short and fast. She’s shivering, eyes trained on Santiago. He raises a palm, fingers splayed out. 

“Breathe in for four,” he instructs, lowering his fingers one by one as he counts. “One, two, three, four, now hold it, okay, seven seconds. One, two - okay, you’re fine, try again. Breathe in; one, two, three, four…”

This time she’s able to hold her breath for longer than a few seconds. Eventually she makes it to the count of seven, then Santiago walks her through letting the air out of her lungs slowly instead of all in a rush. She keeps her eyes on his hand, her focus narrowed down to just that, and to getting air, until her breathing evens out. She lets go of the death grip she’d had on the table and sinks into the bench weakly. 

“You good now?” Aaron says, breaking the silence. She nods as Tom glares at Aaron from beside her. Chell lifts her eyes back to Santiago, offering an expression that she hopes is apologetic, but he waves his hand in the air as if to erase it. 

“Happens,” he says simply.

Tom settles into the bench at her side, gingerly retrieving his phone. He looks at the screen for a few seconds, then sighs and puts it back in his pocket.

“I don’t want to push you, Chell, so you just get up and go if you want to be alone. But if you could answer one question, that’d be great, because I think I know someone who can help and I’d have to call soon if she wants to meet the convoy in time.” A pause. “Did you come from that place? Aperture?”

She meets his eyes. Nods.

“Okay. Does the name Melanie Reardon mean anything to you?”

She shakes her head. Who could this Melanie Reardon be, who knows about Aperture and can help Chell? A scientist or some other employee? She wants to ask, but she knows her body wouldn’t make it easy, and Tom’s phone is tucked away again out of her reach. So she tries to communicate her curiosity with her expressions, and can’t even trust herself with that. Too much time keeping her thoughts off her face, too little time spent around humans. She whirls her hands around each other, like she could draw the information out of him like a rope and wind it up.

“Mel owns the farm here. It was gifted to her by its original owners when -” Tom shoots a cryptic look at Santiago, who shakes his head minutely - “Well, when they moved into the city. She came here one day too, from Aperture. This was around uh… around the time of… well, it was a couple decades ago. Says it was abandoned. She was some sorta volunteer, a test subject.”

It takes a long minute for Chell to turn this over in her mind. She curls her fingers into her palms, feeling the dull bite of her nails. Decades ago. Decades? She struggles with a timeline. She was there, she knows now, for that long. Was there whenever Mel was there. Doing what? Awake, or not? Not, she thinks, probably. Another test subject - there, alive. She realizes then, why her hands are clenched into fists and her eyes prick with heat, like she might actually cry. She stares hard at Tom and mouths _How?_ , the word coming out as a harsh breath. How did she make it out? Had she gone untested? Had she been let go? Had _she_ let her go?

Tom shakes his head sadly. “I don’t know much. Mel was in there for a long, long time. She warned everyone away from the place, and she doesn’t speak of it much. Those of us who work the fields around here know, but only to make sure we stay away. I’m sorry. Maybe she can tell you more.”

Chell draws back, looking away, out the window. Someone was there, alive. What does it matter now? What does it matter that they passed like ships in the night, both unaware of the other? 

“Chell,” Tom says carefully, “I know this has been a lot, but I have one more question. Are there others like you? Is… anyone else alive down there?”

She thinks, briefly, of drawings scrawled along the walls, empty cans of food and water and scraps of bedding. Her own image painted like a mural, an image of herself asleep, seemingly at peace, concrete under her fingertips. Then another memory comes. _Whos’ fault do you think it’s gonna be when the management comes down here and finds ten thousand flippin’ vegetables?_ Her stomach clenches. She feels unseated, like the ground is no longer stable; in her mind’s eye, row upon row of containment units flash by.

She turns around to look at Tom again, stomach sour, teeth clenched. She shakes her head once. _No_.

It’s enough. She gets up, crosses over to the fridge and swipes her half-eaten can of corn. Nobody says anything, the kitchen silent save for the sound of Aaron chewing, the breeze out back coaxing her spoon-alarm to a gentle twinkle of metal on metal. She goes back to her bedroom and sits on the mattress, looking out over the yard, where the truck is still parked. After a few long minutes, she watches as Tom leaves the house and drives down the road. Chell lies down in the bed, listening to the sounds of Santiago and Aaron walking around the house. Tom returns. She eats when she’s hungry. She watches the sun move across the sky, and when it’s near to dusk, she falls asleep and has the first dream she can remember having since before she’d ever walked herself into the lobby of Aperture Laboratories.

She dreams of this place. The farmhouse, the outbuildings. It’s all the same, down to her very self, and the people now populating her life, faces drawn with pity. But the dream farm isn’t growing wheat, and when dream Chell walks out the back door, bare feet in the grass, the sun high and warm, the fields are acres upon acres of rows and rows and rows of headstones. She walks among them, she looks for her name, she looks and looks. She never finds it.

\----

Her morning routine is the same, but she skips her vocal practice. She can hear low voices in the kitchen as she walks down the stairs, but they fall silent when she enters the kitchen. Tom and Santiago are there, eating canned peaches, but Aaron is nowhere in sight. Tom gives her a smile and a little wave. Santiago gives her a cheery “Good morning, Chell!”

She just eyes them, suspicious. Of course, what else would they talk about if not for the strange, mute girl who had appeared suddenly in their lives?

“Do you want some breakfast?” Tom asks. She shakes her head. “We’ll have real food soon, couple days.”

Chell gathers her hair up, tying it back with a ponytail. She notices Santiago watching, and turns her eyes on him. He gives a sheepish sort of smile, running a hand through the floppy hair on top of his head. The sides are shaved. He cuts a sideways glance at Tom, whose hair is the exact opposite: nothing on top, but some growing around the back and over his ears. Chell puts her hands on her hips, shooting Santiago a look that she hopes is chiding enough, and surprisingly, he laughs. It’s a strange, silly non-verbal moment of socialization that has Chell feeling a bit lighter, but as she pushes out the back door to begin her morning exercises, the mood falls. Aaron is out there, stretching.

“Heyyy, lady,” he says. She ignores him, beginning stretches of her own. “Guess that means you don’t wanna join me for a run. Do you even have shoes?”

She does, but the boots are shoved under the bed upstairs and her feet ache just at the thought of putting them on. To his credit, Aaron doesn’t push her for any more interaction, taking off at a jog down one of the grassed waterways that cuts through the wheat.

Tom and Santiago are still in the kitchen when she passes through again after her workout, some papers spread out over the table. They hardly notice her this time. She runs a quick shower, no real choice but to put her clothes back on instead of washing them like she normally would. She idly wonders if a change of clothes and maybe a real pair of shoes would be accessible when the convoy arrives.

She hears voices again on the way back down the stairs, and this time, she thinks for sure that she heard her name. She slows to a stop halfway down the staircase, waiting to see if they heard her footsteps. The voices continue. Chell lowers herself down to sit on a step, wet hair twisted up on top of her head, and listens hard. 

After a minute of trying to piece the sibilant _s’_ s and and harsh _t’_ s into words, the front door swings open. Aaron stands there, blonde hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He looks quizzically at Chell, then down the hall. His expression clears, and he shuts the door behind him. 

“They’re arguing about you,” he says, tone offhand but hushed so the others don’t hear. “Santiago wants to tell you about the apocalypse, but Tom thinks you’re gonna freak out again like you did yesterday.”

Chell can only stare. They both pause, then both relax as the voices continue. Given some context, it _does_ sound like they’re arguing. Chell points to Aaron.

“Me? Hell, I’m with Santi on this one. What’s the difference if we tell you now or later?”

She spreads her hands in agreement. Aaron grins, still too cocky for comfort, but trots up the stairs to sit beside Chell, stinking of sweat.

“Okay! So, the apocalypse. Get this: aliens.”

He waits for a response. Chell blinks at him, savoring the way his grin turns down at the corners. 

“I’m not joking, you know. I mean, it wasn’t the real apocalypse, but it coulda been. Aliens invaded.”

She knew about the aliens. She _thinks_ she knew about the aliens. There were some news stories, but she was preoccupied. She circles her hands around each other. _Then what?_

“Damn, Santi was right. You don’t even give a fuck.”

She does give a fuck. Whatever catastrophe the world endured just seems very, very far away. She shrugs.

“What’s going on?”

They turn and look through the railing. They must have alerted Tom and Santiago, who are now standing in the hall.

“Just telling goldilocks here about the alien apocalypse,” Aaron supplies.

“Fuck’s sake, Aaron,” Tom sighs, rubbing a hand over his eyes, at the same time as Santiago goes, “‘Goldilocks’?”

“Don’t worry, she doesn’t believe me.”

Chell shakes her head.

“She _does_ believe me, but she doesn’t care.”

Chell raises her eyes to the ceiling. She hears Santiago laugh. “Okay, how about this one: she does believe you, but she already knew.”

All three turn to look at her. She shrugs, then flips a hand from side to side. _Sort of._

“Well, I guess there’s no point hiding it now. Let’s talk,” Tom says, and they all head back into the kitchen to gather again at the long table.

The other two seem content to let Tom lead, like he had the night before. Chell’s not sure if it’s because he’s older or if he holds some sort of rank over them. He settles across from Chell. “We’ll just start at the start. If you were involved with Aperture in any capacity, I’m sure you’ve heard of Black Mesa, correct?”

Heard of it, yes. Heard all about it. Heard constantly about Black Mesa, heard loud and clear what was more important - 

Chell screeches that train of thought to a halt. _Filhinha_ , comes a voice, a memory, _you know how important it is that we beat Black Mesa to the punch_. The ache in her chest is as sweet as ever. To Tom, she only nods.

“It’s gone,” Aaron interrupts. “Nuked into oblivion.”

“Aaron, you are terribly at storytelling. Shut up,” Santiago says.

Chell stares at her hands. She knew that, too. 

“Turns out Black Mesa was working on a lot of secret stuff, some government weapons shit and some crazier experiments. There’s not a lot of info left, to be honest, but we know that’s where everything originated. They contacted a planet called Xen, which was kind of a… refuge, in a way, for various alien species. Point is, lots of different non-human life got sent to Earth through portals. You okay?”

Chell lifts her head. She nods apologetically, and tries to keep her eyes on Tom as he continues. There’s a sick, oily feeling spreading through her chest.

“Did you know this?”

She nods again.

“And the portal storms?” 

At this, she hesitates. Shrugs.

“Okay, portal storms. Extraterrestrials kept popping up all over the earth, and they weren’t friendly. Turns out most of ‘em were just scared, but the motive doesn’t matter when people were being slaughtered. This is around the time Mel arrived, by the way. She lived here with the farm owners for a while, but antlions kept cropping up and putting everyone in danger. A lot of folk started moving into the city, where the military could keep a safe perimeter. Aaron, stop squirming, you can tell her.”

Aaron was practically vibrating, the table _actually_ vibrating as he bounced his knee. “Antlions are these massive, gross as fuck insect alien things, they have two sets of backwards legs, are you afraid of spiders? ‘Cause antlions are like the worst nightmare of a spider. They live underground and will literally _eat you alive_ with their massive pincers.”

“A very charming description, Aaron, thanks, that’s not gonna scare the fuck out of her or anything,” Santiago says.

“Don’t worry, we haven’t seen any around here in years. We have a lot of ways of dealing with them now. This went on for some time - aliens everywhere, cities overcrowded, food getting scarce. They had us runnin’ scared, but we didn’t even know how bad it was about to get. You ever been to a beach? You can see these schools of fish in the ocean sometimes, all swimming away, but you don’t see the sharks chasing them until later. That’s what happened. Does the word com-bine mean anything to you?”

Chell’s mind flashes to the hulking machine in the shed out back. She furrows her brow in confusion, the words _combine harvester_ jumping at her from the pages of the operations manual she’d been using as leisurely reading material.

“I guess not, huh?”

She opens her mouth, shuts it again. Shakes her head, tentatively.

“The Combine are what we truly had to fear, and all the Xenians feared them too. They’re like a parasite race, swooping in on different planets and taking over. Usually just by genocide. Taking the planet’s resources, or the planets themselves. And all these portals opening up on earth drew their attention. They wanted - “

Tom is cut off by Santiago suddenly knocking his knee against his sharply. Tom looks conflicted for a second, but then it resolves. Chell is distracted from the strangeness of the interaction as her mind churns over this new information. She can hear it now, the proper noun: _the Combine_.

“There was a war,” Tom said simply. “We lost.”

“The Seven Hour War,” Aaron says, and there’s a sort of distance in his tone, almost reverent. Chell wonders where this sits on the timeline; looks at Aaron and Santiago, who can’t be older than maybe twenty-five, who’s eyes don’t have the same haunted, faraway look that Tom’s do. 

“There are a lot of things that aren’t very clear. The first thing they did was try to isolate us, keep us in those cities behind barriers, all cut off from the rest of the world. Seems to have been worse over in Europe, from what I can gather, because of all the people living close together to begin with. Out here, we’ve got this huge country and more space to hide, so there were more pockets of resistance. You can wonder about the rest of the world, but we’re only just recently beginning to hear about that anyway. The Combine are not quite gone, bu...t something happened over there - overseas.”

“Gordon fucking Freeman happened,” Aaron cuts in.

“That’s just a legend,” Santiago scoffs.

“You can’t deny he was real!”

“Yeah, he _was_ real, but even if he’s _still_ real, he didn’t do it alone.”

“He might have, you don’t know.”

There’s no heat to the argument - probably one they’ve had over and over. Tom rolls his eyes. “You can regale her with tales of Freeman later, we’re just laying down the basics. Certain parts of the world, the Combine set up these huge communication towers. We know one of them was destroyed a few years back, and without being able to phone home, the Combine here on earth had to hobble around on their own. We were able to open up communication, tear down some barriers - say what you will about people, but humanity in general, we never give up without a fight. It’s been messy, lots more loss of life, but for now we’re pretty stable. At least here in the US, and we know most of Europe is hanging on, Japan and pretty much all of the South Pacific islands. But we only know that because…” he trails off again. 

Santiago taps his fingers against the tabletop. “We’re one of the resistance groups,” he admits, and some of the tension leaves Tom. “We go back to before the destruction of City 17 - that’s the one with the communication tower that blew up - but we mostly, eh. We mostly work the fields, you know? There are still a lot of very hungry people, and the Combine had a lock on food production. Good thing is there were plenty of humans kept around to work the farms for them, and as it turns out most of them had ties to some resistance group or another, so the food industry is the first one we took back. At least in this country.”

“We’ll be here a couple months at least working the winter harvest, then we’ll plant oats and come back in the fall. You’re welcome to stay, so long as you’re not afraid of a little work, but nobody’d mind taking you back into the city if you like,” Tom says, peering at Chell carefully. “Speaking of - we have a pretty wide network out there. If there’s anyone - any family or anything that you might be wondering about -”

He cuts himself off at Chell’s slow head shake. No. What family she had… she’d already gone looking. She knew he was gone, now. She chooses to ignore the tense silence, the pity she doesn’t blame them for feeling, and turns her gaze back out the window. There’s a voice, a memory that surfaces now that it’s attached to context: _What’s going on out there will make you wish you were back in here_.

Now she knows why no one had come looking.

“Hey, woah,” Santiago says, suddenly leaning across the table, fingers wrapping hesitantly around her forearm. Chell jolts backward, the touch like an electric shock, and Santiago is apologizing again. 

“You - it looked painful,” he explains, and that’s when Chell realizes she’d been gripping her left hand around her wrist tightly enough that her fingers ache when she pries them apart.

Tom folds his arms across his chest. “Okay, that’s enough.”

Chell stares at her fingers, at her wrist, the memory of Santiago’s warmth pressing stinging tears into her eyes. That voice in her mind - it was wrong, somehow. Dull and low. Distorted by memory? By fear? Or true - selfish and full of malice? _I’m the only thing standing between us and them._

A promise of safety. A desperate lie. But the Combine had happened, the threat had been real after all.

She takes a few deep breaths, offering Santiago a shaky smile to halt the guilt written across his face.

“If you need to take some time alone… I know it can be a lot to come to terms with,” Tom offers. Chell shakes her head in an emphatic _no_. She can’t spend another afternoon up there, trapped with her thoughts and the sounds of three men moving around the house like ghosts.

So she spends the afternoon in the truck, sitting shotgun while Aaron drives up and down the fields and regales her with stories of destroying antlion nests, saving friends from poison headcrabs, and a Vortigaunt he made friends with after saving its life. Chell can’t decide how much of his stories to believe, but discovers his role in the advance party had been to eliminate any alien threat that might have invaded the property during the growing season. But their journey in the truck had led them to what he called a Thumper in perfect working condition. From afar, it looked like a small oil pump, a heavy weight beating rhythmically into the ground, sending vibrations to keep antlions at bay. Aaron admits that there haven’t been antlions seen around here in years, but it can’t hurt to run the Thumpers anyway.

Hunger keeps Aaron quiet for most of the ride back, which suits Chell just fine. She settles more comfortably into the passenger seat, hand out the window to let the air run through her fingers. The wind buffeting the loose hair around her face felt good, the bump of the truck as it ambled over the grass oddly soothing. Back at the house, she sits at the table for lunch and doesn’t get up again until dinner: Tom and Santiago explain to her the plan for the harvest, Chell scribbling questions down on paper, watching her shaky handwriting smooth out to something more legible with practice. The others will arrive in two days, including Mel Reardon, who Chell is so curious about that it makes her anxious.

Santiago stops by her room that evening, grin triumphant as he holds up a book that he’d promised to lend her if it was still floating around with the rest of his belongings. Chell brightens. His hair is damp from a shower and he keeps sweeping the longer hairs back over the top of his head as he summarizes the book, barely managing not to give away the ending. Chell, whose laugh most likely would sound like pebbles grating under the hell of a boot, settles for a grin and an obvious eye-roll when he snaps his mouth shut just before revealing a plot twist. 

He more than makes up for Chell’s stilted reciprocation in conversation. Santiago seems to have the uncanny ability of knowing what she’s trying to say based on body language and vague hand gestures alone, which must be a perk of his outgoing nature. He watches everybody when they speak, not just Chell, and rather than feeling scrutinized, she sits comfortably on the bed with Santiago lounging across the end of it, the window letting the smell of summer in on the breeze. 

He tells her about growing up on a farm that used to belong to his family, but had belonged to the Combine by the time he was four. How he’d grown up under Overwatch Civil Protection - humans who had willingly teamed up with the Combine for some supposed benefits. He’d been CP himself for a number of months after turning eighteen, already a double agent with the resistance. 

It was Chell’s turn to scrutinize him as he talked. He spoke with gestures a lot, mostly with the intention of brushing off any tension, as if the past was long gone and not worth fussing about. She thought of how he’d helped her through yesterday’s panic attack with familiarity, and considered the quiet argument he’d been having with Tom that morning in the kitchen. She ruffles the pages of the worn paperback he’d lent her, his chatter having tapered off to a yawn and his thoughts having turned inward. Chell looks up from the book after a few minutes of silence and catches him looking at her knees, at the metal implants there.

“Hey, Chell, can I ask you a question?” he says, sat up now and mirroring her cross-legged position. He still look hesitant after she nods, mouth tugging down in concern. “You don’t have to answer if it upsets you, I’m just… curious. How long… ? Er. What year was it, the last time you remember knowing?”

Chell blinks. As long as she doesn’t try to consider the long span of time as loss, she’ll be okay. Carefully, she holds up nine fingers.

Santiago squints. “Nine?”

She nods, dropping her hands back into her lap.

“Two-thousand nine?”

Two-thousand nine. May 18, bright and early on a Monday morning. She nods again.

“Oh. Okay. Thanks for telling me.”

 _No,_ she thinks but can’t say, _thanks for caring_. Unbidden, the image of the earth, bright and blue and beautiful and very far away, flashes in her mind. She rubs at her wrist idly.

“Hey,” Santiago says again, this time from the doorway just before he ducks down the hall to his own room. “I’m not gonna ask what you went through unless you feel like telling, but. I’m glad you made it out of there.”

She agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos and comments on the first chapter! The semester ends for me next week so I’ll have more free time to write.
> 
> A note on the timeline is thus: I’ve bent it to my will. Much of the timeline is vague with regards to the Half-Life franchise, and while I think my intetpretation makes sense for this story, there are a couple issues with the “official” timeline information that just won’t bend easily to fit. Clearly, I don’t believe in the ridiculous nonsense about Chell having been in extended stasis for 50,000 years and in fact I will get fired up about it given half a chance, so let me know if you wanna hear me rant.
> 
> I’m on twitter @ hello_deer (but be warned, I’m deep in KH hell).


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